The hope had been that the ‘companionate family’ model would sustain the institution of marriage through a tricky patch. The reality was that it often raised unattainable expectations and was later accused of being a major contributor to marital disillusionment and the rise in the divorce rate. By the end of the 1960s it was clear that government would have to think again if the traditional family was to survive the fallout from revolutionary sexual politics.
It was no longer possible to try and shame married couples into staying together. Plan B was to encourage those who did divorce to re-marry. It was an admission that not every couple could or should stay together ‘til death us do part. Instead, the idea was that even when individual marriages failed, the institution would survive.
The Divorce Reform Act of 1969 made it much quicker and easier for couples to split and re-tie the knot, and initially it seemed the tactic might work.

…

Conversely, apricot pedestal carpets, fluffy toilet-roll covers and potpourri fragrance are reflections of the continuing influence, perhaps, of the Ladies’ National Association for the Diffusion of Sanitary Knowledge. The ‘smallest room’ may offer abundant clues as to how the owner sees themselves, their aspirations and self-confidence. My wife’s grandmother, for example, used to have two supplies of lavatory paper in her highly scented bathroom: soft for the ladies and scratchy Izal for gentlemen callers (as well as her husband). From class values to sexual politics, one learned more about her character and background from a trip to the lavatory than anywhere else.
While Britain developed its own unique loo politics based on centuries of subtle toilet-training, elsewhere in Europe and around the world, different historical, religious and cultural forces have been at work. The French toilet remained a ‘hole in the ground’ long after the sit-down WC had won universal acceptance in the UK, and while many Brits might consider such basic provision as archaic and uncivilised, the international world of sanitary hygiene remains divided over the ‘sit or squat’ debate.

The bone tool of our apelike ancestor first smashes a tapir’s skull and then twirls about to transform into a space station of our next evolutionary stage—as the superman theme of Richard Strauss’ Zarathustra yields to Johann’s Blue Danube. Kubrick’s next film, Clockwork Orange, continues the theme and explores the dilemma inspired by claims of innate human violence. (Shall we accept totalitarian controls for mass deprogramming or remain nasty and vicious within a democracy?) But the most immediate impact will be felt as male privilege girds its loins to battle a growing women’s movement. As Kate Millett remarks in Sexual Politics: “Patriarchy has a tenacious or powerful hold through its successful habit of passing itself off as nature.”
31 | Racist Arguments and IQ
LOUIS AGASSIZ, the greatest biologist of mid-nineteenth-century America, argued that God had created blacks and whites as separate species. The defenders of slavery took much comfort from this assertion, for biblical prescriptions of charity and equality did not have to extend across a species boundary.

It was capable of occasional, sporadic eruption into the mainstream of music, as with groups like the Jesus and Mary Chain and the Smiths in the mid-1980s or the Madchester bands at the end of the decade; it could even produce a major commercial success like Viz comic; and it channelled a great deal of energy into creating a new incarnation of stand-up comedy. But mostly this end of youth culture was characterised by its defiant refusal to seek a mass market.
It was also known for its right-on attitudes, and in particular its embrace of sexual politics. This was, remarked the comedy writer John O’Farrell, ‘the world of the new puritans’, where the campaign to drive sexism out of society seemed sometimes to shade into a suspicion of heterosexuality and of sex itself. David Baddiel’s account of the discussion about Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was in part a riposte to this dour current, and was certainly seen as such in some quarters.

…

Loaded’s core market, however, was younger: ‘Most of our readers are in their early twenties,’ admitted Brown in 1994 and, though he insisted that this wasn’t relevant, arguing that the magazine was ‘about a devil-may-care attitude, not demographics’, the disparity in age and outlook became ever more apparent as the decade wore on. In the hands of a new generation, untouched by the gender wars and sexual politics of the 1980s, the subtle nuances of irony melted away.
With that fig-leaf gone, there seemed to be less newness and more laddishness on display, so that the new FHM was separated from the old Penthouse only by an attitude of irreverence and a thong. That thong, however, was a hugely important dividing line, on the other side of which lay pornography. The fact that the lads’ mags didn’t stray across it was a significant reversal of what had once appeared to be an inexorable trend towards ever more explicit material in high-street newsagents.

…

It lent a new middle-class legitimacy to a lifestyle that would once have been considered slovenly and irresponsible, while adding a degree of tolerance; even if there lurked a suspicion that this was all a bit patronising, that the adoption of the term ‘lad’ implied that working-class men weren’t really adults, but merely adolescent minds trapped in grown-up bodies. Within a few years the word ‘chav’ would gain currency, to describe those who behaved like lads without the income or education to justify their conduct.
Meanwhile, there was less talk by the middle of the decade of sexual politics, though the changes wrought by feminism became ever more entrenched. In 1997 the number of women in the national workforce exceeded that of men for the first time in the country’s history, a revolutionary moment that largely passed without notice. This was a relatively recent trend and one that had a profound impact on the male half of the population; in the 1960s there were 15 million men in employment in Britain, thirty years later there were just 11 million.

Nowadays it is much better understood that sexual differentiation begins well before birth, and that the brains of human males (as well as other animals) undergo a process of “masculinization” in utero when they receive a bath of prenatal testosterone. What is noteworthy about this story, however, is that Money could assert for almost fifteen years in scientific papers that he had succeeded in changing Brenda’s sexual identity to that of a girl, when exactly the opposite was the case. Money was widely celebrated for his research. His fraudulent results were hailed by feminist Kate Millet in her book Sexual Politics, by Time magazine, and by The New York Times and were incorporated into numerous textbooks, including one in which they were cited as proving that “children can easily be raised as a member of the opposite sex” and that what few inborn sex differences might exist in humans “are not clear-cut and can be overridden by cultural learning.”19
David Reimer’s case stands as a useful warning about the uses to which biotechnology may be put in the future.

The changes freed women for work outside the home in an economy rapidly shifting from manufacturing toward services, shedding blue-collar labor but crying out for pink-collar workers. In the richest countries the proportion of women in paid jobs and higher education rose steadily after 1960, and, like every era before it, this age got the thought it needed. Books such as The Feminine Mystique and Sexual Politics urged middle-class American women to seek fulfillment outside their traditional roles. In 1968 a hundred protestors broke up the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. By the 1990s men were actually sharing housework and parenting (even if their wives and girlfriends generally still did more).
As early as 1951 an American sociologist named David Riesman saw where things were heading. In a story called “The Nylon Wars,” simultaneously celebrating and mocking American consumerism, he imagined strategists advising the president that “if allowed to sample the riches of America, the Russian people would not long tolerate masters who gave them tanks and spies instead of vacuum cleaners.”

That's why it's important to point out that even the worst
of today's television-a show like The Apprentice, say­
doesn't look so bad when measu red against the dregs of
television past. If you assume there will always be a market
for pulp, at least the pulp on The Apprentice has some con­
nection to people's real lives: their interoffice rivalries, their
battles with the shifting ethics and sexual politics of the
corporate world. It's not the most profound subj ect matter
in the history of entertainment, but compared with the pab­
ulum of past megahi ts--compared with Mork & Mindy or
Who 's the Boss?-it's pure gold.
But in making this comparative argument, some might
say I have set the bar too low. Perhaps the general public's
E V E R Y T H I N G B A D I S G O O D F O R Yo u
133
appetite fo r pulp entertainment is n o t a sociological
constant.

ALSO BY BARBARA EHRENREICH
Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War
The Snarling Citizen
Kipper's Game
The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed
Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class
The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment
Re-making Love: The Feminization of Sex (with Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs)
For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (with Deirdre English)
Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (with Deirdre English)
Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness (with Deirdre English)
The Mean Season: The Attack on the Welfare State (with Fred Block, Richard A. Cloward, and Frances Fox Piven)
[1] Eighty-one percent of large employers now require preemployment drug testing, up from 21 percent in 1987. Among all employers, the rate of testing is highest in the South. The drug most likely to be detected—marijuana, which can be detected weeks after use—is also the most innocuous, while heroin and cocaine are generally undetectable three days after use.

She didn’t have Twitter, a blog, or any other form of personal Internet expression. A scant web presence is so rare these days, alluring in and of itself. She was telling her story through the ancient medium of theater.
Months into my Google gumshoe work on Nellie, she appeared at a talk I was doing at the New Yorker festival. It was a hard crowd to make giggle, and they were full of self-serious questions about race and sexual politics that I answered unsteadily, tired and underprepared. Afterward I met Nellie in the green room and shook her frail hand and was surprised by how deep her voice was, like an old British man’s. Her eyes were half closed, her collar buttoned up as high as it could go. She looked like Keats or Edie Sedgwick or some other important dead artist.
“I’m such a big fan of yours,” I told her, having only ever Google-image-searched her.

On the contrary, it’s pretty embarrassing. Looking back, I don’t know why I never worked up the nerve or saved up the money to take a bus to the city and see for myself. But my point is that the performance that really interested me was Carr’s: the spectacle of her judgment; the drama of her arguments; the way she interwove her descriptions of various performers and pieces with reflections on sexual politics, AIDS, urban life, and everything that seemed to be going on at once right around me and far beyond my reach. What won me over finally was not the force of her ideas but the charisma of her voice.
Q: Do you think she would be happy to hear that? Don’t you think that she was trying to persuade her readers, to engage them on the level of opinions and ideas, rather than to charm and dazzle them with her prose?

“The Badaulet is very loyal to the state. He believes that the Chinese state is divinely sanctioned by the Mandate of Heaven. You should take him seriously, he’s an important political development.”
“He’s a tribal lunatic! There’s no reason for you to involve yourself with him! What do you expect to gain from him? There’s nothing left but sand and land mines between here and Kazakhstan!”
Why was Mishin so bitterly jealous? His sexual politics were his worst flaw. Yes, true, she had a penchant for taking lovers, but this was China. For every hundred women in China there were a hundred and thirty men. What else should the world expect?
And Jiuquan, a deeply technical city, had an even more destabilizing male-female imbalance. Mishin was from Russia, where the men died young and the women were lonely. He was being a fool.
Lucky kicked through the airlock, snarling and slapping at his earpiece.

An early Paolo Hewitt article was one of the exceptions. He came along to interview us in 1984 with the intention of trying to find out what we were like as people, and get a sense of our relationship. We completely stonewalled him and were humourless and earnest. The article makes me cringe now. He was trying fairly harmlessly to get us to admit we fancied each other, but we were too wrapped up in our right-on sexual politics to talk about such a thing, so he came to the conclusion that we were more friends than lovers.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. Like any self-respecting new couple, we had spent the entire previous year in bed, but it didn’t seem cool to tell that directly to the NME. We gave off the opposite impression – of being coy and sexless, and having a slightly suspect brother–sister type relationship, like the White Stripes.

I have no idea what that means in the context of this extended Clan-family structure thing, except he treats me like I’m made of eggshells and soap bubbles. Great class, behaves like a real gentleman, then again, he’s probably a gold-plated bastard under the smooth exterior. That, or Uncle Angbard is trying to throw us together for some reason. And he is a tough cookie. Right out of The Godfather. Trust him as far as you can throw him.”
She leaned back farther. “Next Memo: sexual politics. These people are basically medievals in suits. Olga is the giveaway, but the rest of it is pretty hard to miss. Better not talk about Ben or the divorce, or the kid, they might get weird. Maybe I can qualify as an aged spinster aunt who’s too important to mess with, and they’ll leave me alone. But
if they expect me to lie back and act like a, a countess, someone’s going to be in trouble.” And it could be me, she admitted.

By the end of the decade, the
Beaumont Society had about 700 members, although another 2,000 had
passed through. It developed a more formal organization, with a constitution, an elected executive and regional officers. The Beaumont Society was
criticized by sections of the gay and women’s movements and other trans
148
U N E Q UA L B R I TA I N
groups for its low-profile approach, operating as a ‘closed closet’, failing to
engage with contemporary sexual politics and criticism of marriage and
family structures, and for the exclusion of transsexuals, homosexuals and
fetishists from its membership.123 However, one of the society’s founders,
Alice L100, explained that the society dissociated itself from the gay movement to overcome the assumption that cross-dressing men were necessarily
gay (many of its members were married, and support for wives was a central
part of the society’s activities) or touting for sex.124 The Beaumont Society
now allows homosexual transvestites to join, but an offshoot, the Seahorse
Society, retains the original focus on heterosexual transvestites.

I wonder what my partner thought of it all—as a feminist, she might say it totally dehumanizes women, and accuse me of taking her to see the public enslavement of her gender. Relations might be frosty for the next few days.
We cross the street towards the Chamber of Agriculture and, nervously, I ask her opinion. She reflects for a moment, and then says that the show was much classier than she’d expected. ‘And I’d really like to know how that girl took off her stockings without taking off her shoes.’
It’s a conclusion that says as much about Parisian sexual politics as it does about the city’s erotic cabaret.
Où est le sexe?
Where, then, does this leave Parisian sex?
The city cherishes its reputation for being completely uninhibited and free-speaking. Deep down, it still thinks its theme tune is Serge Gainsbourg’s song ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’*****, which contains a chorus that can be hilariously translated, rather like one of the old French sex films, as ‘I come and I go, between your kidneys, and I restrain myself.’

, in the curious lyric: ‘Now I find I’ve changed my mind and opened up the doors’. Most of the UK had no idea what the drug was, or that it even existed, or that the Beatles had taken it. Neither did the Beatles, initially, since their drinks were spiked with it by their dentist after dinner one evening.9 But the drug soon entered the culture and it popularized, if not normalized, recreational drug use in that era and beyond, and revolutionized youth culture, sexual politics, music and art on both sides of the Atlantic. Times were changing; in Western Europe and the US drugs saturated everyday life.
LSD was banned in the UK in 1966. During the debate on legislating against the drug, even Britain’s staid law lords revealed themselves to be strangely fascinated by it, with one, Lord Saltoun, asking, ‘May I ask the noble Lord whether LSD-25 is the drug that enables you to remember what happened when you were born?

EFFECTS OF TELEVISION ON THE HUMAN BEING
the National Institute of Mental Health for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, reports that a majority of adults, nearly as high a percentage as children, use television to learn how to handle specific life problems: family routines; relationships with fellow workers; hierarchical values; how to deal with rebellious children; how to understand deviations from the social norm, sexually, politically, socially and inter- personally. The overall fare of television situation-comedies and dramatic programs is taken as valid, useful, informative, and, in the words of the report, "true to life." Most viewers of television programming give the program- ming concrete validity, as though it were not fictional. When solving subsequent, similar problems in their own families, people report recalling how the problem was solved in a tele- vision version of that situation.

Animated by desire, armed with rights, this
figure ceded concern with shared political rule to its representatives and
chased after its own satisfactions. This is the subject split between “citizen”
and “bourgeois” that dogged liberal democratic theory for two centuries, that
Marx makes the basis of his critique of the liberal state, and that the neoliberal
form of homo oeconomicus will finally leave behind.
60. See Melissa Cooper’s Family Values: Neoliberalism, New Social Conser­
vatism, and the Sexual Politics of Capital (forthcoming from Zone).
61. See Jean Elshtain, Public Man / Private Woman: Women in Social and
Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Wendy Brown,
Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Totowa, NJ:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1988); Kathy Ferguson, The Man Question: Visions of
Subjectivity in Feminist Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press: 1993);
Linda Zerilli, Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and
Mill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

Like others who have grown up during struggles for “liberation” or against discrimination, they have had the experience of learning to look differently at themselves and at their peers and have had to resist internalized oppression as their own aspirations rubbed up against those of others newly claiming a place in the sun.
By 1975, Dan’s career in music education had run into a series of obstacles, complicated by various kinds of sexual politics. He had married after college and had two children, a daughter and a son. The pattern of the time had him making the decisions about where the family would live to fit the availability of jobs, and about returning to school, but at the same time, Dan said, “It was a very strange thing because our agreement was we won’t have any kids until we get out of school, but she had suddenly gone and stopped using her birth control pill.… I like women, but I find that there is a major nesting instinct that hits hard and wide.”

Bea’s suspenders had gone the way of everything else, an omelette had been made and eaten, and they were back in bed.
Raising her head from the pillow, Bea said, ‘Why … You jealous?’
Her bed wasn’t really big enough for Bea, never mind for both of them and the way it was positioned against a wall meant Bobby lay half on/half off, his back to the open door.
‘No. Not really.’
‘That’s usually the reason men ask …’ Bea was matter of fact, as if this was unqualifiably true, so maybe it was. Her PhD was in sexual politics, one of the things that made her relationship with Sanchez so interesting; another was a ring of bruises around her upper wrists. So far, both of them had been too polite to mention those.
‘I just wondered,’ said Bobby.
Actually, he knew it was at least a year because he’d seen a photograph in the Chronicle. Some charity affair where Bea stood next to her mother, with Pete Sanchez to one side.

pages: 357words: 94,852

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
by
Naomi Klein

From the evidence so far, it’s clear that Trump and his top advisers are hoping for the sort of response Bortnowska described, that they are trying to pull off a domestic shock doctrine. The goal is all-out war on the public sphere and the public interest, whether in the form of antipollution regulations or programs for the hungry. In their place will be unfettered power and freedom for corporations. It’s a program so defiantly unjust and so manifestly corrupt that it can only be pulled off with the assistance of divide-and-conquer racial and sexual politics, as well as a nonstop spectacle of media distractions. And of course it is being backed up with a massive increase in war spending, a dramatic escalation of military conflicts on multiple fronts, from Syria to North Korea, alongside presidential musings about how “torture works.”
Trump’s cabinet of billionaires and multimillionaires tells us a great deal about the administration’s underlying goals.

After forty-seven years 'by the rivers of Babylon', the decision of one man, in its way as seminal as that of David, restored Zion.21
THE PERSIANS
539-336 BC
CYRUS THE GREAT
Astyges, King of Media in western Persia, dreamed that his daughter was urinating a golden stream which squirted out the whole of his kingdom. His magi, the Persian priests, interpreted this to mean that his grandsons would threaten his rule. Astyges married his daughter to a weak, unthreatening neighbour to the east, the King of Anshan. This marriage spawned an heir, Kourosh, who became Cyrus the Great. Astyges dreamed again that a vine was growing from between his daughter's fecund thighs until it overshadowed him - a sexual-political version of Jack and the Beanstalk. Astyges ordered his commander Harpagus to murder little Cyrus, but the boy was hidden with a shepherd. When Astyges discovered that Cyrus was not dead, he butchered and cooked Harpagus' son and served him to his father as a stew. It was not a meal that Harpagus would easily forget or forgive.
On the death of his father in about 559 BC, Cyrus returned and seized his kingdom.

…

Now he found Egypt divided in a vicious struggle between King Ptolemy XIII and his sister-wife Cleopatra VII to secure for Rome the richest prize of the East: Egypt. But he could not have foreseen how this young queen, deposed from the throne and in desperate straits, would shape his will to her own ends.
Cleopatra demanded a secret audience with the master of the Roman empire. This accomplished impresario of sexual-political pantomime had herself carried into Caesar's palace wrapped in a laundry bag (not a carpet) - perhaps divining that he was susceptible to such theatrical excitement. Gaius Julius Caesar, battleworn and grizzled, was fifty-two and self-conscious about his balding pate. But this astounding if somewhat chilling life-force, possessed of all the talents of war, letters and politics, and the remorseless energy of a younger man, was also a sexual adventurer who had slept with the wives of both Crassus and Pompey.

Ranging across popular culture, literature and social mores, he re-creates that lost world with a flair all the more impressive when you realise he was born in 1974 … No one who reads State of Emergency will think of the decade in quite the same way again’ John Gray, New Statesman
‘Magisterial … for me a Proustian experience’
Andrew O’Hagan, London Review of Books
‘As he proved in his earlier works, Sandbrook is a masterly magpie. Nothing escapes his gaze, from the silk lavender dressing-gowns sported by Peter Wyngarde’s Jason King, through the sexual politics of Doctor Who, to John “never one to miss a bandwagon” Lennon sending a cheque to support the striking Clyde shipworkers. Throw in deft précis of the rise in football hooliganism and birth of the mugger, the introduction of the Pill and boom in pornography, and the depressing side-effects of brutalist council blocks, and you have as eclectic a historical grab-bag as you could wish for’ Christopher Bray, Independent on Sunday
‘Meticulously fair … The paradoxes of the Seventies are brilliantly dissected and analysed’ Simon Griffith, Mail on Sunday
‘Detailed and authoritative … sophisticated and nuanced … Sandbrook is both knowledgeable and entertaining … this is a fine addition to what is becoming a monumental series on the history of modern Britain’ Adrian Bingham, BBC History Magazine
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dominic Sandbrook was born in Shropshire in 1974, an indirect result of the Heath government’s three-day week giving couples more leisure time.

…

It was all very prim and stiff and mainly concerned with keeping you away from boys.’5
All this changed in a very short space of time, roughly between 1968 and 1970. One key influence was the bohemian underground of the late 1960s, which was fertile soil for ideas of liberation and self-realization, and which included prominent future feminists such as Rosie Boycott, Germaine Greer and Rowbotham herself. In fact, although the well-educated young men and women who made up the counterculture thought of themselves as radicals and revolutionaries, their sexual politics were unattractive, to say the least. The gospel of free love was supposed to be a way of challenging bourgeois ideology; it was also, of course, a way for young men to blackmail women into sleeping with them. ‘Chicks’, as the underground journalist Richard Neville called them, were told that they were conservative or boring if they refused male attention. ‘It was paradise for men in their late twenties: all these willing girls,’ one woman later recalled.

This collection includes all the
classic texts, as well as the story of the
founding of the city by the prophetess
Libuše.
Franz Kafka A German-Jewish
Praguer, Kafka has drawn
the darker side of central Europe
– its claustrophobia, paranoia and
unfathomable bureaucracy – better
than anyone else, both in a rural
setting, as in The Castle, and in an
urban one, in one of the great novels
of the twentieth century, The Trial.
Ivan Klíma A survivor of Terezín,
Klíma is another writer in the Kundera
mould as far as sexual politics goes,
but his stories are a lot lighter. Judge
on Trial, written in the 1970s, is one
of his best, concerning the moral
dilemmas of a Communist judge.
Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the
Light is a pessimistic novel set before,
during and after the Velvet Revolution
of 1989. The Spirit of Prague is a very
readable collection of biographical
and more general essays on subjects
ranging from Klíma’s childhood
experiences in Terezín to the current
situation in Prague.

Charles Haddad, “Ad Executives Love Turner Tales About Old Times and New,” Atlanta Constitution, March 5, 1999, H2.
7. Apparently taken from an interview with Bob Hope in the mid-1970s, this ironic quote by the founder of one of the nation’s most watched news networks is from Patrick Parsons, Blue Skies: A History of Cable Television (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 453.
8. This point is drawn from Becker’s book on modern cultural identities and sexual politics as examined through the lens of media coverage and representation of gay America: Ron Becker, Gay TV and Straight America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 86.
9. Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), xi.
10. Ken Auletta, Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way (New York: Random House, 1991), 5.
CHAPTER 17: MASS PRODUCTION OF THE SPIRIT
1.

Burns, Western Civilizations, 152.
5. Those persons of foreign birth who
were granted citizenship under the
administration of Cleisthenes were
an exception. Aristotle, arguably
the greatest of all the Greek
philosophers, was ineligible to become a citizen of Athens and was
for this reason denied appointment
as the head of the Academy of Plato
in Athens following Plato’s death.
6. Eva Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus:
Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). See
also Riane Eisler, Sacred Pleasure:
Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the
Body (New York: HarperCollins,
1995), 104–7.
7. Durant, Heroes of History, 80.
8. Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato,
Civil Society and Political Theory
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1992), 85.
9. Aristotle: The Politics and the Constitution of Athens, ed.

Since ‘man is much more of a sex creature than a moral creature’, sex education should be given to recognize the central and beautiful part it plays in life.39 But while Goldman insisted on the ‘free growth’ of the innate tendencies of a child, she did not foresee a time like Godwin and Ferrer when education would become an entirely spontaneous affair. She continued to believe in the creative power of the good teacher: ‘The child is to the teacher what clay is to the sculptor.’40
Sexual Politics
Goldman’s arguments on government, revolution and education were invariably clear and perceptive, but her most important contribution to anarchist theory was in giving it a feminist dimension. She was particularly incensed about the status and conditions of women in her day and her outspoken views caused much of her notoriety. She detested the double standard which prevailed in the relations between the sexes.

Which is to say the article spoke of my own sexual attractions to this world, told of Joey’s inadvertent murder on that night, and quoted from a couple of the more explicit index cards of The Mad Man. It seemed reasonable to let Hasler, since he was the subject of the essay, speak for us both. As to Mike’s more recent history, yes, I was reticent. But much of it was there for (as they say) those who could read. Five days after I sent it off, it was accepted by a Canadian magazine of radical sexual politics out of Toronto called Umbilicus.
Later, I wrote it up in a brief and rather stripped letter, with pret—
ty much nothing personal in it at all as to incident, urges, or emotions—almost as I’d explained it to Irving that morning. Only I put it in an envelope and sent it to Almira Adler at Breakers’ Point.
Two weeks after that, an envelope stuffed with my contributor’s copies of Umbilicus arrived.

Tarzan, however, so often the only blue-eyed blond among the apes (now the official name for the sub-group of five out of the fifteen/sixteen blacks in the nest [Raven, Jack the Ripper, Thruppence, Angel, Spider]) polarizes them in a very different way. His fawning fascination, his near-belligerence, and general lack of use for anyone white makes it impossible to see him/them without a whole aura of sexual/political resonances, which they carry like their lights. (Two thoughts-First:) Even so, everyone seems more or less able to absorb the situation with tolerance and hardly a comment. (Second:) With all these wacked-out spades, there doesn't seem to be one among them, man or woman, in a similar position with a white group (Glass, triumvirate with Spitt and Copperhead, seems a very different thing. Why?)

Enter Meredith Johnson, the new vice president of DigiCom, hard drive incarnate: “We are talking about platform-independent RISC processors supported by 32-bit color active-matrix displays and portable hard copy at 1200 DPI and wireless networking in both LAN and WAN configurations.” By the end of her first day, she has invited her old flame Tom Sanders up to her office. (“You still partial to dry chardonnay?”) Before he knows what hit him, she has his pants open and is preparing to do it in both LAN and WAN configurations. Tom runs scared, her wrath still ringing in his ears. Game on.
Disclosure is Jacqueline Susann dressed up as modern sexual politics. No doubt Crichton decided that by reversing the roles (a dicey move in itself, implying that harassment by women is not just morally but statistically equivalent to harassment by men) he would be freshening the debate. In the event, it merely makes you wonder what turns him on: whether he just enjoys writing about women like Meredith Johnson—T. rex in sling-backs. The book, full of its own bravado, muscles into some crowded ethical areas, but there’s something timid and square about the whole enterprise.

And there are other markets for a hunter’s surplus. Having concentrated food to offer one’s offspring changes the relative payoffs for males between investing in their young and competing with other males for access to females. The robin bringing a worm to the nestlings reminds us that most animals that provision their young do so with prey, the only food that repays the effort to obtain it and transport it.
Meat also figures into sexual politics. In all foraging societies, presumably including our ancestors’, hunting is overwhelmingly a male activity. Women are encumbered with children, which makes hunting inconvenient, and men are bigger and more adept at killing because of their evolutionary history of killing each other. As a result, males can invest surplus meat in their children by provisioning the children’s pregnant or nursing mothers.

After being awarded the PhD, he had, remarkably, combined secret work for Comintern and the OGPU with open collaboration with the German Communist psychologist and sexologist Wilhelm Reich, who was then engaged in an attempt to synthesize the work of Marx and Freud and later earned a probably undeserved reputation as ‘the prophet of the better orgasm’. Deutsch publicly assisted Reich in the ‘sex-pol’ (sexual politics) movement, which ran clinics designed to bring birth control and sexual enlightenment to Viennese workers, and founded a small publishing house, Münster Verlag (Dr Arnold Deutsch), to publish Reich’s work and sex-pol literature. At the time when he moved to London in April 1934, Deutsch was under surveillance by the ‘anti-pornography’ section of the Vienna police.41 Even if, during Deutsch’s period in England, the Security Service had known of his earlier involvement with Reich and the sex-pol movement, it would probably have regarded his unusual career as improbable cover for a Soviet spy.